From Body & Soul, a play for fearless women

Our social innovation program (SiG@MaRS) works with many female social entrepreneurs who are creating a new path outside stereotypical roles. To celebrate them and the other “fearless women” making a difference, SiG held an event featuring Judith Thompson’s play, Body & Soul at the Tarragon Theatre last Tuesday. There, SiG@MaRS and the Ontario Trillium Foundation announced a feasibility study for the School for Social Entrepreneurs based on the UK model.

Julia Moulden, author of We are the New Radicals, asked the room of 100+ entrepreneurial women, “Do you hear that? It’s the sound of women rising”. Her position is that today’s fearless women are on a mission, “and this time we intend to save the world.”

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Henry Chesbrough first coined the term “open innovation” in his book Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (2003).  He described a shift from a traditional closed model of innovation to an open model in which R&D-driven firms look outside their organization to solve internal research and development problems.  By working with external individuals or organizations, a firm can benefit from an increase in the number and diversity of potential solutions that would not have been possible in-house.

Life sciences businesses can now take advantage of this trend after the launch of the latest online marketplace for problems and solutions.

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Why do most alliances fail?

This week, John Buckingham drew upon his 30 years of expertise building health care businesses globally in a MaRS Best Practices Series session on effective alliance management, “Partner or Perish: Forging Effective Alliances”.

Alliances are a form of collaboration in which individual organizations retain strategic autonomy while committing resources to a joint activity. The most common types of alliances are formed for operational (e.g. manufacturing) or specific project needs. The right alliance or partnership can help an organization achieve its goals in many different ways: by giving it access to outside expertise, access to flexible resources, reducing its financial risk, and/or increasing its speed of development or of getting to market.

Yet less than 40 per cent of alliances in life sciences meet their objectives.

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Amateur biohackers?

First there were computer hackers. Then life hackers, Ikea hackers and iPhone hackers. Now biohackers are having a moment.

DIYbio is an organization encouraging citizen scientists to take biology out of the lab and into the garage. Although critics warn that such experimentation could yield evil plots to synthesize deadly pathogens, the group’s early projects are decidedly less sinister: Bioweathermap, for example, maps the bacteria on crosswalk buttons from Boston to San Francisco.

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MaRS wins city award

The who’s who of city building has spoken and MaRS has made the cut.

The Canadian Urban Institute (CUI) announced this week that MaRS has earned its Creative City Award for our role in building creative capacity in Toronto.

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Aphrodisiac Telephone

I recently visited Surreal Things, a special exhibition on Surrealism by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). The exhibition explores the philosophy behind Surrealism and how those ideas inspired more commercially minded designers of fashion, jewelry and other consumer goods. As I was wandering there amongst ruby lips, aphrodisiac telephones and cloud sofas, it struck me that there is something in common between the surrealist ideals and the culture of entrepreneurship that MaRS is helping to build in Ontario.

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The Economist shifts its focus from economic collapse to health care reform with a special report this past month on Health 2.0.  Quoting health care expert Joanne Shaw, the magazine gives digital health care some deep historical context, comparing the rise of bottom-up, interactive digital care to the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation as both movements destabilize traditional hierarchies.

University of Toronto’s Neil Seeman, director of the Health Strategy Innovation Cell at Massey College, agrees.  He tells The Economist that Health 2.0 “reinvents how we identify opinion leaders and exploit disruptive innovation,” and points to the growing influence of health-related blogs, wikis and other new media tools (even the CDC is is Second Life now).

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The social tech for social change week

Toronto is abuzz with innovators, social entrepreneurs, digital media developers and leading design thinkers, not to mention a swath of charitable organizations dedicated to social change.

Imagine if these communities were working together. It could be transformational.

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Jenga: Demonstrating gravity

Quick: What are the seven innovations that revolutionized the world?

According to Jacob Zimmer’s grade school teacher, our society was revolutionized by Gutenberg’s press, Copernicus’ solar system, Newton’s physics, Darwin’s evolution, as well as the Industrial, Nuclear, and Information Revolutions.

It inspired Jacob Zimmer to create “Dedicated to the Revolutions,” an innovative show that engages the audience around these scientific revolutions that have altered the course of humanity… while remembering that science is fun (and funny). It opens tomorrow and plays until April 12th.

In the following interview, I ask Jacob about what the MaRS community of innovators can learn from his show.

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Happy 175th! Photo Credit: Baked Creation

Innovative businesses need creative cities and Toronto is a hotbed of creativity and innovation these days. So it’s with thanks for this that MaRS wishes Toronto a Happy 175th Birthday!

I’m liking Spotlight Toronto’s and Jaime Woo of Torontoist’s tribute: “Six Words on Toronto” — a short film about the city and the people who live in it. The premise: Torontonians describe the city in exactly six words.

Watch it now to see how our community describes its vibrancy:

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